OpenLog

Ubiquitous Technical Surveillance

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:22:40 GMT

I’m Teague de La Plaine. This is Open Logbook—a public log of observations on humanity, shared systems, and the long future.

We live inside a surveillance environment.

Not a dystopian future one. A mundane, commercial, always-on one.

Every tap, swipe, search, purchase, movement, and message is logged somewhere. Not usually by governments at first, but by private companies whose business model depends on collecting, correlating, and selling behavioral data. Governments come later, often through legal compulsion or quiet partnership.

This isn’t paranoia. It’s infrastructure.

You don’t opt out of ubiquitous technical surveillance by being clever or angry. You opt out by being deliberate—by reducing what you emit, narrowing what you expose, and simplifying your digital life so there’s simply less to harvest.

What follows is not about disappearing. It’s about lowering your signature.

Think tradecraft, not tinfoil.

The Core Idea: Reduce Attack Surface

Most people try to “secure” everything while continuing to generate an endless stream of data. That’s backwards.

The real leverage comes from producing less data in the first place.

This is where tech degrowth enters the picture: fewer devices, fewer accounts, fewer services, fewer points of failure.

A simple phone beats a perfectly hardened smartphone every time.

Practical Countermeasures (Plain English Edition)

1. Remove Your Data From the Open Internet

Data brokers aggregate public and semi-public records into disturbingly accurate profiles. You can:

Use a removal service (or DIY it, if you have time and patience)
Repeat annually—this is not a one-and-done task

This alone dramatically reduces downstream fraud, doxxing, and targeting.

2. Freeze Your Credit (and Your Kids’ Credit)

Credit freezes are free and do not affect your score. Freeze:

Equifax
Experian
TransUnion

If you have children, freezing their credit is tedious—but worth it. Child identity theft often goes unnoticed for years.

3. Enable Fraud Alerts

A fraud alert adds friction. Friction is good. Set it once with any credit bureau; they’re required to notify the others. Make sure your phone number is correct.

4. Lock Down Your Mobile Number

SIM swapping is one of the easiest ways to hijack someone’s digital life. Call your carrier or log in and enable:

Account PIN
Port-out protection
Number lock

If your phone number controls your financial accounts, treat it like a master key.

5. Use Fewer Passwords—and Let Software Remember Them

Humans are terrible at passwords. Use:

A password manager
Unique passwords for every service
Two-factor authentication everywhere it’s offered

Security improves when memory is outsourced correctly.

Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash

6. Assume Free Email Means You’re the Product

If you’re not paying for email, your data is part of the transaction. Paid, privacy-respecting email providers reduce scanning, profiling, and long-term retention. Pair this with:

Encrypted messaging (Signal)
A browser that limits tracking by default
Regular deletion of search and location history

You don’t need invisibility. You need boundaries.

7. Stop Oversharing by Default

Email aliases and masked numbers exist for a reason. Use them for:

Newsletters
Online purchases
Account sign-ups

When one service leaks, it shouldn’t expose your entire identity.

8. Lock Down Taxes, Loans, and Government Accounts

Create:

An IRS Identity Protection PIN
An online Social Security account (before someone else does)

Download and store:

Tax filings
Student loan records
Payment histories

Paper still has advantages.

9. Opt Out of What You Can

You won’t stop all data sharing, but you can reduce the volume:

Opt out of prescreened credit offers
Register with the Do Not Call Registry
Decline optional data sharing in financial apps

Again: friction.

10. Use Fewer Devices—and Make Them Boring

Every “smart” device is a sensor. Consider:

A simple phone instead of a flagship smartphone
Single-purpose devices (camera, e-reader, GPS)
Fewer apps, fewer permissions, fewer notifications

Convenience is expensive. You pay with data.

11. Be Skeptical of Health and Location Apps

Some data categories are more sensitive than others. Location and health data often:

Lives on third-party servers
Is not protected by medical privacy laws
Can be subpoenaed or sold

If an app doesn’t need the data to function, don’t give it.

12. VPNs: Useful, Not Magical

A VPN can:

Obscure traffic from your ISP
Reduce tracking on public networks

It does not:

Make you anonymous
Protect you from bad account hygiene

Think of it as a seat-belt, not invisibility cloaking.

A Word on “Extreme Privacy”

For those who want to go further, there’s a deeper end of the pool.
Michael Bazzell’s book Extreme Privacy lays out a comprehensive, disciplined approach to minimizing digital exhaust.

It’s not for everyone.

But even adopting 10–20% of that mindset—fewer accounts, fewer digital dependencies, fewer always-connected devices—has outsized benefits.

The Quiet Rebellion

This isn’t about fear. It’s about agency. Ubiquitous surveillance thrives on:

Complexity
Convenience
Complacency

The counter is:

Simplicity
Intentional friction
Enough-ism

You don’t have to disappear. You just have to stop making it easy.

All One/Teague

48.8767° S, 123.3933° W

We’re all dying

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 10:20:42 GMT

I’m Teague de La Plaine. This is Open Logbook—a public log of observations on humanity, shared systems, and the long future.

Society does a remarkable job of keeping us from noticing the obvious: we are going to die.

Not in an abstract way. Not someday. In a personal, inconvenient, unavoidable way.

So we’re encouraged to stay busy. To consume—objects, entertainment, food, sex, information. To keep our minds occupied enough not to wander into dangerous territory. Because once you really internalize that life is finite, a lot of things stop making sense. Entire industries depend on you not thinking too hard about that.

Hospice workers will tell you the same story over and over. At the end, people don’t talk about the house, the car, the résumé, or the numbers in an account. They talk about people. Moments. Love. Regret. The times they showed up—and the times they didn’t.

That pattern should bother us.

You will only get to kiss your wife a finite number of times.

You don’t know what that number is. None of us do. But we live as if it’s effectively infinite. As if there will always be another morning, another chance, another “later.” Infinity makes us careless. It turns presence into background noise.

Finitude does the opposite. It sharpens things.

Photo by The Cleveland Museum of Art on Unsplash

The problem isn’t death. The problem is denial.

When death is kept at arm’s length—medicalized, euphemized, hidden—we start living as if life were a rehearsal. We delay what matters. We tolerate what we shouldn’t. We trade depth for distraction and call it comfort.

Memento mori isn’t about being morbid. It’s about being honest.

It’s the refusal to live under the illusion of “someday.” It’s the quiet understanding that time is not a resource you manage—it’s a gift you’re spending whether you notice or not.

Once you really accept that, priorities rearrange themselves without much effort.

People matter more than possessions.

Presence matters more than productivity.

Courage matters more than comfort.

And attention becomes sacred.

Scarcity always sharpens attention. When you remember that moments are countable, you stop skimming your own life. You listen a little more closely. You put the phone down sooner. You choose the harder conversation instead of the easier distraction.

This is the part most people avoid, because it requires feeling things fully.

Distraction protects us from anxiety, but it also numbs joy. To really live—to “suck the marrow out of life,” as Thoreau put it—means accepting vulnerability. Loving without guarantees. Choosing meaning over ease. Showing up even when it would be simpler not to.

So here are a few reminders I try to keep close. Not as rules. As bearings.

This day will not repeat.
Later is not promised.
People are not background scenery.
Attention is how you honor what matters.
Comfort is a poor substitute for meaning.

You don’t honor death by obsessing over it. You honor it by refusing to waste the life that precedes it.

Memento mori.

Not to frighten yourself—but to wake up.

All One/Teague

Dumbing it down

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 10:35:42 GMT

I’m Teague de La Plaine. This is Open Logbook—a public log of observations on humanity, shared systems, and the long future.

There is a quiet anxiety baked into modern texting. Not the content of the messages themselves, but the expectation around them. The awareness that someone has seen your message. The awareness that you have seen theirs. The unspoken clock that starts ticking the moment the read receipt lights up.

We pretend this is convenience. It’s not. It’s low-grade surveillance mixed with social obligation. A leash that hums instead of rattles.

We’ve trained ourselves to be perpetually reachable, perpetually interruptible, perpetually half-present. The phone buzzes and we reach for it without thinking. A reflex, not a decision. The room we’re in fades. The person across from us dims. Even our own thoughts get pushed aside, mid-sentence, mid-feeling.

And then we wonder why sitting alone in an empty room feels unbearable.

The problem isn’t just distraction. It’s displacement. The smartphone has become a universal solvent, dissolving boredom, friction, waiting, solitude—along with a lot of meaning we didn’t realize was attached to those things. It collapses everything into a single glowing rectangle and tells us this is efficiency. This is progress.

But something essential gets lost when every moment is mediated, recorded, optimized, and shared.

I know this because I’ve lived on the other side of it.

In 2007–2008, I lived in Sierra Leone. My technology stack was laughably simple by today’s standards: a basic Nokia phone that made calls and sent texts, a laptop, a DSLR camera, an MP3 player, and a Moleskine notebook with a pencil.

That was it.

No infinite scroll. No push notifications. No algorithm whispering what I should care about next.

And somehow—paradoxically—I captured more of my life than I ever have since.

I took fewer photos, but each one mattered. I waited for the moment. I thought about the light. I learned to see before I lifted the camera. I wrote constantly, because writing was the fastest way to hold onto an experience. I listened to music intentionally, album by album, not as sonic wallpaper but as a companion to long walks and quiet evenings.

Nothing felt wasted. Nothing felt bloated. Nothing competed for my attention unless I invited it in.

Life had texture then.

The modern smartphone promises to do everything. That’s precisely the problem. When one device absorbs all functions, it also absorbs all boundaries. Work bleeds into rest. News bleeds into relationships. Other people’s urgency bleeds into your inner life.

We’ve quietly accepted the idea that every message deserves immediate attention. That silence requires justification. That delay is rude. This is a cultural choice, not a law of nature—and it’s one worth rejecting.

Here’s a simpler contract with the world: if it’s urgent, call me. If it’s not, email me.

Email is patient by design. It lets a thought arrive, settle, and wait. I’ll read it when I’m ready. I’ll respond when I’ve actually thought about it. I check email twice a day—morning and evening. That’s enough. Nothing meaningful falls apart in the gaps. In fact, most things improve when given a little space.

Texting pretends everything is urgent. Very little actually is.

A radical remedy suggests itself—not as nostalgia, but as design.

Ditch the smartphone.

Photo by Vance A. on Unsplash

Not retreating to a cave. Not rejecting technology wholesale. But deliberately breaking the monolith into single-purpose tools again. A phone that is just a phone. A camera that exists to take photographs. A music player that plays music. A notebook that holds thoughts without judging them or ranking them or selling them.

Single-use tools don’t compete with one another. They don’t beg for attention. They wait patiently until you decide to engage. They create friction in the right places—small pauses that give you a chance to choose rather than react.

This isn’t about asceticism. It’s about reclaiming agency.

When Thoreau went to the woods, he wasn’t running from civilization. He was stripping life down to see what remained essential. The same experiment is available now, even in the middle of cities and careers and families. You don’t need a cabin at Walden Pond. You need fewer portals.

Imagine walking out the door with intention rather than contingency planning. No camera roll swelling with thousands of near-identical photos you’ll never revisit. No ambient dread that you’re missing something online. No pressure to be instantly responsive to everyone at all times.

Just presence. Just observation. Just the quiet confidence that if something truly matters, it will find its way to you.

The irony is that this kind of simplicity feels radical now. Almost transgressive. As if choosing to be unreachable for a few hours is a moral failing rather than a basic human right.

But the ability to sit alone in an empty room—without flinching, without reaching for distraction—is not a luxury. It’s a skill. One that modern technology actively erodes unless we defend it.

I don’t miss Sierra Leone because it lacked technology. I miss it because my tools had edges, limits, and purpose. They served my life instead of colonizing it.

Nothing wasted. Nothing excess. Life, once again, at human scale.

All One/Teague

48.8767° S, 123.3933° W

What If Communities Were Never Too Big to Care?

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 15:15:37 GMT

I’m Teague de La Plaine. This is Open Logbook—a public log of observations on humanity, shared systems, and the long future.

Modern cities only know one verb: grow.

Grow outward—sprawl chewing up farmland and forests.
Grow upward—glass canyons where no one knows their neighbors.
Grow abstract—people reduced to flows, units, metrics.

When cities fail, we call it mismanagement. But what if the problem is more basic?

What if cities are simply not meant to grow forever?

The Biological Mistake We Keep Repeating

In nature, healthy systems don’t expand without limit.

Cells divide. Forests regenerate. Ecosystems self-balance.

Unbounded growth is a pathology—cancer, not success.

And yet we’ve built our communities on the assumption that bigger is always better. More people. More density. More throughput. More GDP.

We don’t ask whether a city can care for itself—only whether it can scale.

A Different Model: Civic Fission

Imagine a simple rule:

When a community reaches a certain size—population, footprint, resource demand—it splits.

Not collapse. Not exile. Not abandonment.

Division.

A new community is founded nearby. Close enough to remain connected, far enough to remain independent. Linked by public transit. Shared commons. Separate governance.

Cities don’t sprawl. They reproduce.

Like cells. Like amoeba. Like life.

Photo by Eduard Delputte on Unsplash

Why Size Matters More Than Density

Above a certain scale, something breaks:

Responsibility becomes abstract
Power centralizes
People stop being known and start being managed

We compensate with bureaucracy, surveillance, algorithms. We call it “efficiency.” But it’s really a loss of legibility—the inability of a community to see itself.

Small communities don’t need dashboards to know when something is wrong. They feel it.

Care is local. Always has been.

Growth Without Accumulation

This isn’t anti-growth. It’s anti-hoarding.

In this model:

Growth happens through renewal, not concentration
Prestige comes from founding, not owning
Elders teach, then move on
Skills circulate instead of calcifying

Founding a new community becomes an honor, not a failure. A rite of passage, not a rupture.

Instead of cities that get “too big to fix,” we get networks of places that remain human-sized by design.

No Sprawl. No Canyons. Just Constellations.

Picture regions not as megacities, but as clusters.

Distinct communities, each with their own character, values, and governance—connected by fast, free public transit. You can move easily. You can choose where you belong.

The region becomes a constellation, not a blob.

This solves problems we pretend are unsolvable:

Housing
Infrastructure overload
Political alienation
Environmental collapse

Not with better tech—but with better limits.

Choosing Limits Before Collapse Chooses for Us

Every civilization eventually hits constraints.

The only real choice is when.

Do we let limits arrive as crisis—floods, fires, housing implosions, social fragmentation?

Or do we choose them early, deliberately, with dignity?

A rule that says “no community grows beyond the point where people can care for one another” is not a restriction.

It’s a commitment.

The Quiet Radicalism of Enough

This idea doesn’t require revolution. It doesn’t demand purity. It doesn’t assume people suddenly become saints.

It only asks us to accept one uncomfortable truth:

Infinite growth is not a human value.

But care is.

What if our communities were designed around that instead?

Against Petty Weapons

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 12:14:18 GMT

I’m Teague de La Plaine. This is Open Logbook—a public log of observations on humanity, shared systems, and the long future.

Seneca had little patience for cleverness when it came to the things that actually terrify us.

In Moral Letters 82, he takes aim at a familiar mistake: the belief that fear—especially fear of death—can be argued away. That if we just sharpen our logic enough, stack the syllogisms neatly, or coin the right phrase, we’ll finally feel free.

He doesn’t buy it. And neither do I.

Virtue, Seneca says, is not complicated. It is direct. Courage, honesty, steadiness—these are not abstract achievements. They are ways of standing in the world. And when someone is preparing for something that actually matters—a dangerous crossing, a moral stand, the reality of loss—their mind should not be cramped by clever traps and petty puzzles. It should be open, spacious, and strong.

Big moments demand big posture.

Seneca’s frustration isn’t just with bad philosophy. It’s with misplaced effort. He sees people trying to solve existential fear the way they’d solve a logic problem, and he thinks this misses the point entirely. Fear of death is not a flaw in reasoning. It’s a condition of being human. We inherit it early. We breathe it in long before we can name it. It becomes part of how we move through the world.

So he asks questions that still sting:

How do you convince everyone that death is not an evil?
How do you undo a lifetime of conditioning with words?
What speech makes someone step forward when danger appears—when retreat would be easier, safer, and socially acceptable?

Certainly not slogans. Certainly not clever proofs.

Photo by Mark Basarab on Unsplash

Big fears require big tools.

Seneca reaches for an image: a massive serpent encountered by Roman legions in Africa. Arrows bounced off it. Spears glanced away. Even the finest weapons failed—not because they weren’t sharp, but because they were too small. The creature was finally destroyed only when soldiers used stones as large as millstones.

Death is that serpent.

You don’t stop it with delicate instruments. You don’t halt a charging lion with an awl. An argument can be perfectly precise and still useless. In fact, Seneca suggests that some arguments fail precisely because they are too subtle—too light to land.

This is where a practical philosophy begins to matter.

We live in an age of sharp tools. Endless analysis. Endless discourse. Endless opinion refined to a razor’s edge. We are surrounded by explanations for why things are broken and arguments about who is to blame. And yet, when real danger appears—pandemics, climate disruption, war, displacement, systemic collapse—those tools often prove inadequate.

They don’t move people.
They don’t bind communities.
They don’t carry weight.

What does?

Practice. Example. Shared effort. A sense that we are in this together, whether we like it or not.

Seneca makes a quiet but radical point: the goal is not to produce a few heroic individuals. It is to relieve all of humanityof a paralyzing fear. That alone shifts the frame. This is not about personal enlightenment or private escape. It’s about creating conditions in which people can act for the common good without being ruled by terror—terror of death, terror of loss, terror of scarcity.

Fear narrows the moral horizon. It makes us hoard, retreat, harden. It fractures community. And no amount of clever reasoning will fix that.

What does help is weight.

Weight is lived consistency.
Weight is showing up even when outcomes are uncertain.
Weight is building systems—social, economic, cultural—that assume shared fate rather than individual escape.

A practical philosophy isn’t about conquering fear through insight. It’s about widening the path until fear no longer fills the frame. When the ground drops away, you don’t need sharper arguments. You need a way of walking that doesn’t collapse under your own weight.

This is where global community stops being an abstraction and becomes a necessity.

We share one atmosphere. One ocean system. One fragile web of supply, care, and trust. We are already bound together—economically, ecologically, biologically—whether we acknowledge it or not. The fear that fractures us is not death itself, but the belief that we face it alone.

Seneca’s warning, read now, sounds less like ancient Stoicism and more like a modern diagnosis: if you meet massive, shared threats with small, individualized tools, you will fail—not because you lacked intelligence, but because you lacked scale.

The answer isn’t better rhetoric. It’s better orientation.

Build lives that are sturdy enough to lean on one another. Build cultures that value restraint over dominance, care over extraction, sufficiency over excess. Build habits—personal and collective—that make courage ordinary instead of heroic.

Some truths are not solved. They are carried—together.

That’s my reading of Seneca’s farewell: when the monster is large, bring stones. And when the danger is shared, don’t pretend you’re walking alone.

Then keep walking.

Be Wonderful While You’re Here

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 10:39:28 GMT

I’m Teague de La Plaine. This is Open Logbook—a public log of observations on humanity, shared systems, and the long future.

There’s a quiet assumption many of us carry, even if we don’t consciously believe it: that this life is a rehearsal. That the real meaning is elsewhere. Later. After. In the next phase, the next version, the next life, the next upgrade.

But what if it isn’t?

Not as a provocation. Not as a philosophical stance. Just as a working assumption.

Whatever consciousness is, it seems to arise, look around for a while, and then stop. The evidence we have suggests that memory, identity, and awareness are fragile processes tied to the body. When the body ends, the process ends too. Energy continues. Matter rearranges. But experience—the feeling of being here—does not appear to persist.

This idea unsettles people because it removes the escape clause. If there’s no cosmic redo, no guaranteed continuation, then this life isn’t a draft. It’s the whole document.

Oddly, that doesn’t make life grim. It makes it sharp.

Finality gives weight to ordinary moments. A conversation isn’t filler. A kindness isn’t symbolic. A day isn’t something to get through. If this is the only time we get to be conscious in this particular way, then attention becomes the highest form of respect.

Most of us don’t fail morally because we are cruel. We fail because we’re distracted. We postpone being present until conditions improve. We tell ourselves we’ll slow down later, be kinder later, listen better later. Later is seductive because it feels responsible. In practice, it’s where attention goes to die.

Photo by Thomas Ciszewski on Unsplash

This isn’t an argument against religion, nor a case for atheism. It doesn’t require disbelief or faith. It only asks that we take our days seriously. Even the boring ones. Especially the quiet ones.

Being “wonderful” doesn’t mean being exceptional. It means being awake. Capable of wonder. Capable of noticing when someone else is hurting. Capable of choosing decency when no one is watching and nothing is being recorded.

If this is it, then being present isn’t self-help. It’s responsibility.

We don’t need a cosmic purpose to live well.

We need to show up.

Be wonderful while you’re here.

Not because it’s rewarded. Not because it’s remembered forever.

Because it’s rare.

Nur esti, ne fari

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 09:46:46 GMT

I’m Teague de La Plaine. This is Open Logbook—a public log of observations on humanity, shared systems, and the long future.

There is a phrase I keep returning to lately:

Nur esti, ne fari.
Just being, not doing.

It feels almost irresponsible to say it out loud in the world we live in. A world built on motion. On metrics. On proving you are still useful, still productive, still relevant.

We talk a lot about slowing down. But slowing down still assumes movement. A gentler grind. A quieter treadmill.

What I’m interested in now is something more radical.

Stopping.

The problem with “slow”

Slow food. Slow travel. Slow productivity. All good ideas. Necessary, even.

But slow is still framed as optimization. Slow better. Slow intentionally. Slow with purpose.

There is still a hidden demand in there: You should be doing something.

The ancient traditions understood something we’ve lost.

Sometimes the most important act is not to act at all.

Not doing is not nothing

In Taoism, there is wu wei—often mistranslated as “doing nothing,” but more accurately understood as non-forcing. Acting in alignment rather than against the grain of the world.

In Zen, there is just sitting.
In Stoicism, acceptance of what is outside our control.
In Pooh, there is sitting on a log and wondering if it’s time for lunch.

These are not retreats from life. They are returns to it.

Not doing is not absence. It is presence without interference.

La Vojo: the path without hurry

In the Human UNity framework, I’ve been calling this orientation La Vojo—the way, the path.

La Vojo is not about achievement. It’s not about scaling. It’s not even about improvement.

It’s about alignment.

La Vojo asks a different question than modern life does.

Not: What should I do next?
But: What happens if I stop?

Photo by Bernd 📷 Dittrich on Unsplash

Why stopping feels dangerous

Stopping feels wrong because our systems depend on motion.

Capitalism requires consumption. Social media requires output. Careers require momentum. Even “self-care” has been gamified.

When you stop, you fall out of the current.

And that’s the point.

Stopping exposes a frightening truth:

Much of what we do is not necessary.
Much of what we chase does not matter.
Much of our anxiety is manufactured by motion itself.

So we keep moving. Not because we must—but because stillness would force us to see clearly.

Nur esti, ne fari

This phrase matters to me because it is not aspirational. It doesn’t promise enlightenment or productivity gains.

It is permission.

Permission to sit without documenting it.
Permission to rest without earning it.
Permission to exist without justification.

Just being.
Not doing.

The world does not collapse when you stop. Often, it steadies.

A practice, not a lifestyle brand

This isn’t a retreat. It isn’t an app. It isn’t a morning routine you can optimize.

It’s smaller than that.

Sit somewhere. Don’t improve the moment. Don’t narrate it. Don’t turn it into content.

Let the body breathe. Let the mind wander and return. Let the world be unfinished.

That is La Vojo.

The quiet rebellion

In a time of cascading crises—ecological, political, psychological—our instinct is to do more.

But there is another response.

Refuse the pace.
Refuse the panic.
Refuse the lie that constant action is virtue.

Stopping is not giving up. It is opting out of madness.

Nur esti, ne fari.
Just being, not doing.

And discovering—quietly, almost accidentally—that this, too, is enough.

The Future Will Be Built Quietly

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 11:35:12 GMT

I’m Teague de La Plaine. This is Open Logbook—a public log of observations on humanity, shared systems, and the long future.

The future won’t be saved by billionaires. It won’t be burned down by nihilists either.

It won’t arrive in a keynote, a startup deck, or a last-minute miracle. And it won’t look like the glossy renders we’ve been sold—cities of glass and frictionless abundance, humming along while someone else does the thinking.

If anything, the future—the real one—will be built quietly.

By people who opted out early.
By people who learned to live well with less.
By people who stopped confusing speed with progress, scale with care, and growth with health.

This isn’t a manifesto for dropping out of society. It’s a refusal to keep pretending that the default trajectory makes sense.

We Were Promised a Future. We Got a Treadmill.

Most of us feel it now, even if we don’t yet have language for it.

We’re surrounded by tools designed to save time, yet time feels scarcer than ever. We’re promised convenience, yet our lives feel more brittle. We’re told this is the best system imaginable, while quietly absorbing the message that exhaustion is the price of admission.

The dominant story says the future belongs to:

Bigger systems
Faster growth
Smarter algorithms
Fewer hands, more control

But at the edges—away from the spotlight—a different imagination has been forming.

Not a single movement. Not a brand. More like a constellation.

Solarpunk. Lunarpunk. Glitch. Straight edge. Degrowth. Low-tech. Care ethics. Repair culture.

None of these fully agree with one another. But they all share a refusal of the same lie: that the way we’re living now is the only way forward.

Solarpunk: Refusing Doom

Solarpunk starts with a dangerous idea: optimism.

Not the empty optimism of “everything will work out,” but the stubborn kind—the belief that humans can still choose to build systems that serve life rather than extract from it.

Solarpunk imagines:

Energy that’s local and renewable
Food grown close to where people live
Tools that can be repaired, not replaced
Communities that share instead of hoard

It’s not anti-technology. It’s anti-careless technology.

What matters isn’t whether something is high-tech or low-tech, but whether it deepens dependency—or builds resilience.

Solarpunk says: We don’t need permission to live well together.

Glitch: Refusing the Smooth Lie

If solarpunk is the garden, glitch is the cracked pavement where weeds break through.

Glitch culture doesn’t trust systems that look too clean. It understands that seamlessness often hides extraction, surveillance, and control.

Where the official future is frictionless, glitch insists on friction. Where platforms optimize, glitch interrupts. Where power smooths over harm, glitch exposes the seams.

This isn’t chaos for chaos’ sake. It’s a form of literacy.

Glitch says: If the system looks perfect, look closer.

Lunarpunk: Refusing the Colonization of the Inner World

Then there’s the quieter rebellion—the one that happens at night.

Lunarpunk pushes back against productivity culture, against the idea that every moment must be optimized, monetized, or shared.

It values:

Rest
Ritual
Slowness
Emotional intelligence
Care work

Not everything worth doing scales. Not everything meaningful needs metrics.

Lunarpunk reminds us that no external system can be healed if the inner one remains exhausted and hollow.

Photo by Dalila Moreira on Unsplash

Straight Edge, Reimagined: Refusing Excess as Identity

I’ve been thinking a lot about “straight edge” lately—not as subculture cosplay, but as a modern ethical stance.

Not:

No fun
No pleasure
No joy

But:

No exploitation
No debt slavery
No numbing ourselves to survive a system we secretly hate

Clarity becomes an act of resistance. Attention becomes a commons to protect. The body becomes something to steward, not burn through.

Discipline stops being punishment and starts becoming freedom.

Low-Tech Isn’t Backward. It’s Durable.

One of the quiet threads tying all of this together is a renewed respect for appropriate technology.

Not the newest thing. The right thing.

Tools that:

Can be fixed without specialists
Fail gracefully instead of catastrophically
Serve human rhythms instead of replacing them

A sailboat instead of a floating data center. A notebook instead of an attention machine. A tool you understand over one that understands you.

This isn’t nostalgia. It’s systems thinking.

Complexity without resilience collapses. Every time.

What Emerges When You Put This Together

This isn’t about joining a subculture. It’s about synthesizing a way of living.

A life that:

Builds small, durable systems instead of chasing scale
Centers care over control
Values beauty, but not spectacle
Chooses enough over more
Refuses despair without pretending everything is fine

The future won’t look dramatic when it arrives. It won’t announce itself.

It will look like people growing food, fixing things, teaching their kids real skills, sharing tools, resting when tired, and saying no to things that once felt inevitable.

It will be built by people who remembered that living well is not a luxury—it’s a responsibility.

Quietly. Patiently. Together.

How the Powerless Have Always Lived

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 16:14:27 GMT

I’m Teague de La Plaine. This is Open Logbook—a public log of observations on humanity, shared systems, and the long future.

There is a persistent myth that people without power survive by confrontation, sometimes rebranded as revolution. History suggests the opposite. Again and again, groups on the margins endured not by meeting force head-on, but by learning how to live within systems that could crush them—quietly, patiently, and without spectacle.

This is not a modern insight. It is old. Older than states. Older than standing armies. Older than ideology.

In medieval Japan, the people we now shorthand as “ninja” were not defined by stealth or combat in the way popular culture imagines. Their distinguishing feature was something far less cinematic: they lived without power. They existed between clans, beneath hierarchies, and outside formal authority. Their survival depended not on dominance, but on understanding how power behaves.

They learned early what history keeps teaching late: power pays attention to disruption. It ignores continuity.

So they cultivated continuity.

Photo by Gaku Suyama on Unsplash

Rather than announcing themselves, they became neighbors. Rather than asserting identity, they adopted roles. They worked, traded, married, raised children, joined festivals. Some lived for years inside communities before ever acting at all. When action came, it was brief—and then life returned to normal.

What mattered was not the moment of intervention, but the long stretch of belonging that made survival possible before and after it.

This pattern repeats across cultures and centuries.

Diaspora communities survived empires by becoming indispensable locally while remaining unremarkable politically. Religious minorities endured persecution by tightening internal bonds rather than challenging external authority. Stateless peoples lasted generations by preserving culture quietly while adapting outward behavior to prevailing norms.

The lesson is uncomfortable for modern sensibilities: visibility feels like power, but endurance comes from obscurity.

This is not cowardice. It is realism.

Groups without leverage cannot afford purity tests, performative defiance, or permanent outrage. Those are luxuries of security. Instead, survival favors traits that rarely trend: patience, adaptability, mutual support, and a deep understanding of human behavior.

Watch how people respond to pressure. Notice what draws attention and what fades into the background. Learn the rhythms of institutions—not to overthrow them, but to avoid unnecessary friction. Above all, understand that time is a weapon more reliable than force.

The people who endured longest did not imagine themselves as heroes in a grand struggle. They imagined themselves as caretakers of continuity—of families, trades, customs, and shared memory. They measured success not in victories, but in remaining.

In a world that increasingly rewards noise, speed, and spectacle, this older wisdom feels almost subversive. But it is not radical. It is conservative in the deepest sense of the word: it seeks to conserve life, community, and possibility under pressure.

History does not suggest that centralized power collapses easily. It suggests something quieter: power cycles, hardens, softens, and shifts. Those who survive these cycles are rarely the loudest. They are the ones who stay rooted while appearing ordinary.

When authority becomes unpredictable, endurance favors people who are boring, connected, useful, and locally trusted. Not symbols. Not abstractions. People.

That lesson has nothing to do with stealth or tricks or resistance. It has everything to do with restraint.

And it is one worth remembering—because it has worked longer than any slogan ever has.

A small change in how I’m writing — and why

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 15:57:16 GMT

I’m Teague de La Plaine. This is Open Logbook—a public log of observations on humanity, shared systems, and the long future.

Over time, the way I write has been changing.

Not just the topics, but the posture—how I observe, how I question, and what I feel responsible for putting into the world. The lighter, more whimsical cadence of “Tuesdays with Teague” no longer fits what I’m trying to do here, or the scale of what I find myself thinking about.

So I’m making a quiet shift.

This newsletter will become Open Logbook (OpenLog).

OpenLog is where I’ll write longer-form pieces about future human development, shared global systems, language, coordination, and what I’ve been calling CosmoCommons and Terlando. These won’t be hot takes or weekly dispatches. Think of them as observations from the field—provisional, sometimes unresolved, written when there’s something worth recording.

At the same time, I’m separating my writing-about-writing work into a different space under Novellistic, where I’ll focus on indie publishing, craft, tools, and the practical realities of being a working writer. That material deserves its own container, and not everyone here signed up for that.

Here’s the important part:
You’ll be subscribed to both by default, and you have my full permission—and encouragement—to unsubscribe from either one, or both, at any time. No hard feelings, no guilt, no algorithmic sadness. I want readers who choose to be here.

This isn’t a pivot away from readers; it’s a refinement of how I show up. I’m still figuring things out in public, but with a clearer sense of what fits where. If you decide to continue along for the ride—whether to read, challenge, or simply observe—I’m genuinely grateful. And if you step off here, I respect that too.

Thanks for being here, for however long it makes sense.

All One/Teague

Join my new subscriber chat

Teague de La Plaine — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 16:38:27 GMT

Today I’m announcing a brand new addition to my Substack publication: OpenLog subscriber chat.

This is a conversation space exclusively for subscribers—kind of like a group chat or live hangout. I’ll post questions and updates that come my way, and you can jump into the discussion.

Join chat

How to get started

Get the Substack app by clicking this link or the button below. New chat threads won’t be sent sent via email, so turn on push notifications so you don’t miss conversation as it happens. You can also access chat on the web.

Get app

Open the app and tap the Chat icon. It looks like two bubbles in the bottom bar, and you’ll see a row for my chat inside.

That’s it! Jump into my thread to say hi, and if you have any issues, check out Substack’s FAQ.

From Above

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 23:42:29 GMT

I’m Teague de La Plaine. This is Open Logbook—a public log of observations on humanity, shared systems, and the long future.

“Soon you will have forgotten everything. Soon everything will have forgotten you.”
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 8.11

When you pull back far enough, borders blur.

From high above—high enough that nations shrink to patterns and centuries compress into moments—you stop seeing flags first. You see people. Densities. Movements. Fear and hope cycling like weather systems.

Marcus Aurelius wrote about this view. Not as an escape, but as a corrective. A way to remind himself that emperors and slaves, conquerors and conquered, all dissolve into the same dust when time has had its say.

I try to take that view now.

Because up close, the present moment is unbearable.

Professionally, my work supports Israel. That is a fact of institutions, alliances, and the world as it is. Personally, when I look at Gaza—at civilians compressed into ever-shrinking spaces, at children inheriting trauma before language—I feel the old, familiar sickness of empire. The same smell history always gives off when power justifies itself.

From above, this is not a story of good and evil.

It is a story of systems.

Empires draw lines. Markets flow through them. Weapons follow money. Aid follows optics. Suffering follows all of it.

We like to tell ourselves these conflicts are ancient, inevitable, tribal. That story is convenient. It lets modern power off the hook. But from altitude, you can trace the scaffolding clearly: colonial borders, strategic patronage, extractive economics, security rationales layered atop human cost.

This does not absolve violence. It explains its persistence.

Photo by Javier Miranda on Unsplash

From above, I see Israel as a state acting according to the logic all states are trained in: survival, deterrence, leverage. I also see Palestinians as a people caught inside a machine that has never truly accounted for their humanity except as a variable.

Those two truths can exist at once. If they couldn’t, philosophy would be a lie.

Marcus warned against surrendering our inner citadel to rage or despair. Not because anger is false—but because it blinds us to what remains within our control. I cannot steer history. I cannot rebalance power. I cannot redeem a century of decisions made before I was born.

But I can refuse the lie that anyone here is abstract.

From above, there are no “targets,” no “collateral,” no “necessary losses.” Those are words invented at ground level to make unbearable things sound manageable.

There are only people—living brief, fragile lives inside forces they did not design.

The temptation, especially for those of us embedded in institutions, is numbness. To outsource moral discomfort to policy language. To let proximity to power replace proximity to truth.

I don’t want that bargain.

So I sit with the discomfort. I let it inform the future I’m trying to imagine—one less obsessed with growth, domination, and control; one that understands security as mutual, not extractive; one that recognizes that no system built on permanent humiliation can remain stable.

From above, history does not ask us to be pure. It asks us to be honest.

Empires fall. Markets reconfigure. Flags change. What remains is how we treated one another while believing our moment was permanent.

This is not a call to sides. It’s a call to scale.

Pull back far enough, and the question stops being who is right.

It becomes: what kind of world keeps producing this—and what are we willing to change to stop it?

Straight Edge, Reimagined

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 00:51:25 GMT

I’m Teague de La Plaine. This is Open Logbook—a public log of observations on humanity, shared systems, and the long future.

“At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: I have to go to work—as a human being.”
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 5.1

The term straight edge comes with baggage.

For some, it conjures images of hardcore scenes, Xs on hands, rigid rules, and moral absolutism. Abstinence as identity. Purity as posture. A line drawn in permanent marker.

That’s not what I mean.

What I’m reaching for is older—and newer—at the same time.

A way of living that says: I will choose deliberately in a world that profits from my distraction.

A way of living that asks: What happens if we stop anesthetizing ourselves from the consequences of our lives?

This is straight edge, reimagined—not as subculture, but as a modern, ethical operating system.

Not about being better. About being clearer.

The Legacy World

We inherited a system that runs on extraction.

Not just of oil, minerals, forests, and animals—but of attention, health, meaning, and time.

It trains us early:

Eat what’s cheap, fast, and addictive
Buy what’s trendy, disposable, and synthetic
Upgrade constantly
Outsource responsibility
Debt-finance comfort
Let institutions decide what “normal” looks like

The legacy world is loud, stimulating, convenient—and profoundly numbing.

It doesn’t ask much of us. Just compliance.

Straight Edge as Conscious Friction

The original straight edge rejected substances that dulled agency. This version goes further.

Modern straight edge introduces friction where the system wants ease.

It slows us down. It asks questions. It makes consequences visible again.

Not through self-denial for its own sake—but through alignment.

Photo by 愚木混株 Yumu on Unsplash

What We Eat

Food is the most intimate political act we perform daily.

A straight edge lens asks:

Who suffered so this was cheap?
What ecosystem paid the price?
What am I training my body to crave?

For many, this leads toward:

Plant-forward or fully vegan diets
Fewer ultra-processed foods
Simpler ingredients
Local where possible
Enough, not excess

This isn’t about purity. It’s about reducing harm per calorie.

Eating in a way that doesn’t require willful ignorance.

What We Wear

Fast fashion is fossil fuels masquerading as self-expression.

A straight edge approach to clothing favors:

Fewer garments, worn longer
Natural fibers where possible
Repair over replacement
Secondhand before new
Function over novelty
Coordinated capsule wardrobes

Not aesthetic minimalism—but ethical minimalism.

Clothes that don’t scream. Clothes that last. Clothes that don’t require someone else’s suffering to feel “affordable.”

What Technology We Allow In

Technology is not neutral. Some tools expand agency. Others quietly erode it.

A straight edge tech ethic asks:

Does this serve me—or train me?
Is this helping me think—or outsourcing thinking?
Is this extracting my attention for profit?

This often means:

Fewer platforms
Fewer notifications
Open-source where possible
Tools over feeds
Creation over consumption

Not Luddism. Selectivity.

Choosing tech that supports a life, not replaces one.

Who We Bank With

Money is stored intention.

Where we bank determines:

What gets built
What gets extracted
What gets foreclosed
What gets weaponized

A straight edge financial posture favors:

Credit unions and public banks
Ethical or cooperative institutions
Transparency over convenience
Long-term stability over speculative growth

Money as ballast—not leverage.

Who We Legitimize

Every purchase, subscription, vote, and habit is an endorsement.

Straight edge living asks us to be honest about who we’re propping up:

Governments that externalize suffering
Corporations that privatize gains and socialize harm
Systems that require perpetual growth on a finite planet

Withdrawal is not apathy. Sometimes it’s the only available form of dissent.

Living Smaller (and Freer)

This may be the hardest shift. The legacy world equates more with better.

Straight edge flips that:

Smaller homes
Fewer possessions
Less debt
Lower energy throughput
Slower timelines

Not as austerity—but as liberation.

When your life requires less to sustain, fewer people own you.

Shedding the Legacy

This is not about escape. It’s about transition.

We are living through the long unwind of systems that no longer work—but haven’t yet let go. The task isn’t to perfect ourselves inside a broken framework.

The task is to prototype the next one with our daily choices.

Straight edge, in this sense, is not rebellion. It’s preparation.

The Emergent Life

The emergent world will not arrive fully formed. It will arrive through people who live as if it already matters.

People who:

Choose clarity over comfort
Responsibility over convenience
Enough over endless
Care over consumption

Not loudly. Not self-righteously.

Quietly. Daily. Deliberately.

A Closing Thought

Marcus didn’t ask us to retreat from the world. He asked us to participate as human beings.

Straight edge—reimagined—is simply this:

To live awake.

To live aligned.

To stop anesthetizing ourselves from the cost of being alive.

And to build, piece by piece, a life that belongs to the future rather than the past.

A Simple Leadership Mantra (I Stole from Tom Cruise)

Tue, 13 Jan 2026 11:13:22 GMT

I’m bestselling indie writer Teague de La Plaine. This is my weekly newsletter, where I talk about writing and self-publishing in addition to my own life. I keep the newsletter free, because I prefer you spend your money on my books.

I don’t usually look to Hollywood for leadership advice.

But every now and then, something cuts through the noise.

Tom Cruise recently accepted an honorary Oscar. First one, somehow. In the speech, he didn’t talk much about himself. He didn’t pontificate. He didn’t turn it into a victory lap.

He just…thanked people.

Over and over. By name. Crews. Collaborators. People who never get a statue.

And it landed.

Not because it was clever. Because it was human.

Watching it, I realized there’s a leadership lesson here so simple it almost feels insulting to write down. But simple doesn’t mean easy—and most leaders don’t do it.

Here it is:

Thank your team every morning.
Expect excellence from them and give them courage to match it.
And know their names.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Let me unpack why this matters.

Thank Your Team Every Morning

Not in a Slack blast.

Not once a year at an awards banquet.

Not when morale is already in the toilet.

Daily.

Gratitude isn’t a performance. It’s a practice.

Most people don’t need pizza parties or inspirational posters. They need to know their effort is seen. And not abstractly—specifically.

“Hey. I saw what you did yesterday. Thank you.”

That sentence does more for morale than most leadership seminars.

And no—you don’t cheapen gratitude by using it often. You cheapen it by only using it strategically.

Expect Excellence—and Give Them Courage to Match It

This is where leaders get uncomfortable.

Expecting excellence sounds demanding. But not expecting it is worse. People rise—or shrink—to what you signal you believe they’re capable of.

The catch is this: You can’t demand excellence and then punish people for trying.

Courage is the missing ingredient.

If you want high standards, you have to create psychological cover for effort, learning, and failure. Otherwise, you don’t get excellence—you get compliance.

Great leaders don’t just set the bar. They stand next to their people while they reach for it.

Photo by Tobias Mrzyk on Unsplash

Know Their Names

This sounds trivial. It isn’t.

Knowing someone’s name—and using it—is a declaration: You are not interchangeable.

In every organization, there are people doing essential work who feel invisible. Leaders who can quote metrics but can’t remember names are telling on themselves.

Cruise knew the names.

Not because he’s nice. Because he understands something fundamental: People will run through walls for leaders who see them as people.

Why This Matters

We’re drowning in leadership frameworks, acronyms, and LinkedIn-grade inspiration.

Meanwhile, the basics are neglected.

You don’t need a new model.
You don’t need a reorg.
You don’t need a consultant.

You need presence. Consistency. And respect, expressed daily.

So here’s the test:

Tomorrow morning, thank someone by name. Tell them you expect great things—and that you’ve got their back. Mean it.

Do that long enough, and you won’t have to talk much about leadership.

Your team will do it for you.

If you’ve read all my books and shared them with all your friends, you can still upgrade to a paid subscription if you’d like to support me even more.

A World After Money (That Still Feels Like Home)

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 11:04:25 GMT

Most science fiction imagines the future as either a corporate hellscape or a shiny techno-utopia where scarcity magically disappeared offscreen. In my own writing, I wanted something different. Not perfect. Not pure. Just…workable.

The post-capitalist society in my stories didn’t emerge because humanity “solved” itself. It emerged because the old system finally failed loudly enough that it couldn’t be patched anymore.

And what replaced it wasn’t ideology. It was logistics.

The end of capitalism wasn’t a revolution—it was an exhaustion event. In the StarForce/Human Unity universe, capitalism doesn’t collapse in flames. It collapses in spreadsheets.

The symptoms are familiar to us now:

Supply chains that optimize for profit but break under stress
Housing treated as an asset class rather than shelter
Healthcare and education locked behind paywalls
Ecological systems pushed past recovery thresholds
A permanent anxiety hum humming beneath daily life

The breaking point isn’t a single war or market crash. It’s the accumulation of too many simultaneous failures. Climate displacement. Resource shocks. Automation without redistribution. Governments captured by capital but still expected to manage crises.

Eventually, markets stop being trusted to allocate what people need to live.

So humanity does what it always does in an emergency: it improvises.

The Commons Returns—But Upgraded

In my fiction, the cornerstone of the new system is the Commons.

Not the romantic medieval commons. A modern one.

Certain things are declared non-market goods:

Food staples
Housing access
Healthcare
Education
Energy
Transportation infrastructure
Information

You don’t buy these. You access them.

The question isn’t “Can you afford this?”
It’s “What does it cost the system to provide this reliably to everyone?”

And here’s the key: the system is designed around capacity, not profit.

Allocation, Not Wages

People still work. A lot. Just not for money.

Instead of wages, there’s allocation credit—a measure of how much shared capacity you help maintain or expand.

Doctors, engineers, teachers, sanitation workers, farmers, system designers—everyone contributes in different ways, at different intensities, across a lifetime.

No one starves if they don’t work.
But contribution expands your access, autonomy, and influence.

The incentive structure is quiet but firm:

Contribution → trust
Trust → access
Access → freedom

Luxury still exists. Scarce goods still exist. But they’re rationed transparently, not auctioned to the highest bidder.

Status shifts away from consumption and toward competence and stewardship.

Governance Without Rulers

There’s no global emperor. No planetary president.

Instead, the system runs on nested councils:

Local
Regional
Planetary

Each layer is constrained by the one below it, not above it.

Decisions are slow by design. Systems thinking beats charisma. Metrics matter more than rhetoric. If a policy degrades human wellbeing or ecological stability, it is rolled back—no face-saving required.

Power exists, but it’s procedural, not personal.

And critically: no one gets to own the system.

Language Matters More Than You Think

In the stories, humanity adopts a common auxiliary language—not to erase culture, but to coordinate across it.

Translation costs drop. Diplomacy speeds up. Education becomes portable. Identity remains local; cooperation becomes global.

This turns out to be one of the most powerful post-capitalist technologies of all.

Shared language doesn’t create unity. But it removes friction.

So… Could Any of This Happen Here?

Not all at once. And not cleanly. But pieces of it already exist:

Public libraries
Open-source software
Universal healthcare systems
Municipal utilities
Cooperative housing
Public banking
Community land trusts
Mutual aid networks

None of these are radical. They’re boring. That’s why they work.

The real shift isn’t economic. It’s philosophical.

Capitalism assumes scarcity and competition as defaults. Post-capitalist systems assume coordination and sufficiency.

The question stops being:

“How do we grow the economy?”

And becomes:

“What level of provisioning allows humans to flourish without breaking the planet?”

That’s not utopian. It’s ecological realism.

The Quiet Part

The hardest part isn’t redesigning systems. It’s letting go of the idea that worth must be earned through suffering. In my fiction, people still struggle. They fail. They argue. They fall in love. They get bored. They dream.

The difference is this: No one is terrified of being discarded.

And that single change—more than any technology—rewires what humans are willing to build together.

Why I Write This Stuff

I don’t write post-capitalist futures because I think they’re inevitable.

I write them because they’re imaginable.

And imagination precedes implementation.

Every system we live under today was once just a thought experiment someone refused to stop talking about.

This is mine.

If you’ve read all my books and shared them with all your friends, you can still upgrade to a paid subscription if you’d like to support me even more.

Human UNity Epilogue: The System Audit

Tue, 23 Dec 2025 16:24:21 GMT

As I build the worlds for my sci-fi stories, I’ve found myself studying the real systems that shape this one—government, economy, religion, the military, education, and media. What began as research for future civilizations has turned into an audit of our own. This series of essays is part of that exploration: a search for what our systems actually do, and how we might start designing better ones—here, now, before fiction catches up with fact.
This is the final entry in this series and ends out my posts for the year. Enjoy the holidays and let’s all look forward to starting the next year with a renewed sense of purpose and a commitment to working together across all borders and divides.

The Future

A civilization can believe anything about itself until it runs the numbers. Stafford Beer gave us the simplest audit in human history: the purpose of a system is what it does. No slogans, no mission statements—just outcomes.

When we run that audit across our world, the results are plain.

The Ledger of Purpose

System: What It Says It Does / What It Actually Does → True Purpose

Government: Represents the people / Concentrates power for elites → Stability of hierarchy
Economy: Creates prosperity / Concentrates wealth, depletes planet → Capital accumulation
Religion: Saves souls / Controls behavior, hoards assets → Moral management
Military: Defends freedom / Secures resources, sustains empire → Force projection
Education: Enlightens citizens / Sorts by class, trains obedience → Social reproduction
Media: Informs the public / Sells attention, shapes consent → Perception control

Six pillars, one pattern: concentration. Wealth, authority, and narrative all flow upward while responsibility flows down. The machine runs smoothly because its gears interlock; each system validates the others. Government legalizes extraction, economy rewards it, religion blesses it, military enforces it, education justifies it, and media narrates it.

That alignment is not conspiracy. It’s design.

The Sunk Cost of Civilization

Every participant, from president to paycheck earner, is invested in keeping the illusion alive. The alternative feels like chaos, so we defend the familiar even when it’s killing us. Empires aren’t maintained by villains; they’re maintained by habits—meetings, budgets, doctrines. Evil bureaucratizes itself.

But honesty is a solvent. Once you see a system for what it does, you can stop expecting it to do what it says. That clarity is the first act of liberation.

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

The Human UNity Rewrite

Human UNity begins where critique ends—with redesign. Each failing system has a functional successor already sketched in the previous essays:

Legacy System → Human UNity Successor: Primary Outcome

Government → Polisyn (Distributed, participatory governance): Accountability
Economy → Cosmonomics (Regenerative, post-scarcity exchange): Sustainability
Religion → La Vojo (Experiential ethics and awe): Connection
Military → Steward Corps (Planetary preservation and crisis response): Security through care
Education → Sapienics (Lifelong mentorship and mastery): Wisdom
Media → Truth Commons (Transparent information ecosystem): Shared understanding

Each new system is measured not by promise but by pattern. If it distributes power, restores ecology, and deepens empathy, it’s working. If it starts concentrating again, scrap it. Civilization becomes a living experiment, not a monument.

From Empire to Ecosystem

The old order treated the planet as property. The next must treat it as partner. Governance becomes coordination, economy becomes ecology, and defense becomes stewardship. Even spirituality returns to its root meaning—to breathe together.

The transition will hurt. Power never abdicates; it decays. But collapse and renewal are twins. When one structure fails, another has room to grow. Our task is to design the replacement before the rubble cools.

The Warrior’s Closing Reflection

After twenty-four years inside the machine, I know this much: obedience builds strength, but purpose gives it aim. The discipline that once served empire can serve life instead. The courage that once faced an enemy can face extinction. The chain of command can become a chain of care.

Systems are not destiny. They’re habits written in infrastructure. We can rewrite them. We can make their outputs match our values. It begins by asking, relentlessly: What is this system doing—and who is it doing it for?

The Audit’s Final Line

If a civilization consistently produces inequality, confusion, and ecological ruin, then those are not its failures; they are its functions.

Human UNity demands new functions: cooperation, clarity, regeneration. Systems that serve life instead of extracting from it. Structures that make it impossible to lie about purpose.

Because the purpose of a civilization, like any system, is what it does.

Now it’s time for ours to do better.

If you’ve read all my books and shared them with all your friends, you can still upgrade to a paid subscription if you’d like to support me even more.

Media: The Machinery of Meaning

Tue, 16 Dec 2025 16:20:34 GMT

As I build the worlds for my sci-fi stories, I’ve found myself studying the real systems that shape this one—government, economy, religion, the military, education, and media. What began as research for future civilizations has turned into an audit of our own. This series of essays is part of that exploration: a search for what our systems actually do, and how we might start designing better ones—here, now, before fiction catches up with fact.

House of Mirrors

Every empire needs a mirror that flatters it. Ours calls that mirror “the media.”

It promises truth, transparency, and the public’s right to know. But by Stafford Beer’s rule—the purpose of a system is what it does—we judge not by headlines but by outputs. And what the modern media system does is sell attention, not information. It shapes emotion, not understanding. Its real function is to manufacture consent for the order that feeds it.

The Attention Economy

Information has always had power; now it also has a price per click. The business model is simple: capture attention, convert it to data, sell that data to advertisers and politicians. Facts are secondary. Rage is revenue. Outrage travels faster than nuance, so the algorithms obey physics—amplify conflict, bury context.

The result isn’t an informed public but an addicted one. A populace scrolling between dopamine spikes, mistaking stimulation for knowledge.

Gatekeepers Gone Viral

We used to have a handful of newspapers and networks that filtered reality through editorial judgment. That gatekeeping often served elites, but it also slowed the spread of nonsense. The internet blew those gates apart. Now every citizen is both broadcaster and brand. Truth competes with performance. The loudest voice wins.

But even “free” platforms are owned by the same conglomerates that own the old media. The architecture of control just changed its interface. Power privatized the agora.

The Narrative Supply Chain

Watch where the money moves: defense contractors sponsor news hours, fossil-fuel giants underwrite climate coverage, pharmaceutical firms fund health segments. The storylines that threaten investors rarely make airtime. POSIWID again—if the consistent product is distraction and division, then distraction and division are the mission.

The Polarization Algorithm

Outrage is efficient. It keeps audiences engaged and predictable. Every like, share, and comment refines a psychological profile. The system doesn’t care what you believe, only that you believe intensely enough to stay online. Ideology is a metric, not a meaning.

The outcome is a society fluent in reaction but illiterate in reflection. We no longer debate ideas; we trade reflexes.

The Myth of the Fourth Estate

Journalists often enter the field to expose power. Many still do brave, vital work. But the institution they serve runs on the same fuel as the corporations they investigate. Ratings, sponsorship, access. Investigations that threaten advertisers are quietly shelved. Reporters burn out or sell out. The watchdog barks only when its owners approve.

The POSIWID Audit

Does media inform or manipulate? — Manipulates.
Does it unite or divide? — Divides.
Does it challenge power or depend on it? — Depends.
Does it expand understanding or commodify emotion? — Commodifies.

By outcome, media’s real purpose is not enlightenment but management—controlling the flow of meaning to maintain market stability.

Photo by Joshua Rawson-Harris on Unsplash

The Human UNity Alternative — The Truth Commons

If the old media sells attention, the new must cultivate understanding.

The Truth Commons would be a decentralized information ecosystem owned by no corporation and controlled by transparent protocols.

Core principles:

Open verification. Every claim traceable to its source; bias declared up front.
Public stewardship. Citizens fund and govern it collectively—no ads, no shareholders.
Slow journalism. Depth over speed; context over clicks.
Civic literacy. Teaching people how to think about information, not what to think.
Algorithmic transparency. Code is public, adjustable, and answerable.

The goal isn’t neutrality—there’s no such thing—but honesty about perspective. Truth becomes a cooperative practice, not a corporate product.

Reclaiming Narrative

Humans live by stories. Whoever writes them writes reality. To reclaim meaning, we have to reclaim narrative itself—from PR departments, from partisan machines, from the algorithmic gods of engagement.

That begins locally: conversations over dinner tables, community forums, independent presses, podcasts that resist hysteria. Truth rebuilds from the ground up, one honest voice at a time.

Closing the Loop

The purpose of the current media system is what it does: monetize division and anesthetize dissent. The purpose of The Truth Commons is what it must do: reconnect knowledge with responsibility and restore meaning as a shared resource.

A civilization that cannot tell itself the truth cannot steer. Human UNity demands that we learn to speak again—not louder, but clearer.

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Education: Manufacturing Minds

Tue, 09 Dec 2025 16:16:49 GMT

As I build the worlds for my sci-fi stories, I’ve found myself studying the real systems that shape this one—government, economy, religion, the military, education, and media. What began as research for future civilizations has turned into an audit of our own. This series of essays is part of that exploration: a search for what our systems actually do, and how we might start designing better ones—here, now, before fiction catches up with fact.

Factory Education

Every empire needs a factory for citizens. Ours calls it school.

We like to imagine education as a ladder to freedom—open to all, blind to birth, meritocratic. But if we apply Stafford Beer’s principle that the purpose of a system is what it does, we see something colder. Our education system doesn’t liberate; it sorts. It trains obedience, filters ambition, and preserves hierarchy under the banner of opportunity.

The Industrial Blueprint

The modern school was designed alongside the factory. Bells signal shifts. Rows teach discipline. Lessons are broken into standardized units; curiosity is graded by compliance. The first goal wasn’t enlightenment—it was efficiency. The state needed punctual, literate workers who could follow orders and balance ledgers. The factory needed hands that wouldn’t revolt.

Two centuries later, the model barely changed. Only the product line did. We now manufacture human capital instead of steel.

Curriculum as Control

Education pretends to prepare young people for life, but most of what it teaches is how to accept structure. History is sanitized for patriotism; economics reduced to consumer etiquette. The deeper skills—critical thinking, empathy, self-mastery—are electives at best, threats at worst.

Ask what schools actually produce. They yield test scores, credentials, and debt. They deliver bodies to labor markets and minds to ideologies. POSIWID: it works exactly as intended.

The University as Debt Machine

Higher education completes the illusion. The university sells the idea of escape—learn your way to freedom. Yet for most students, the price of admission is a lifetime shackle of loans. Knowledge is secondary; the credential is the product.

Research universities chase grants and corporate partnerships. Professors hustle for funding like small-business owners. Ideas become intellectual property. The library becomes a subscription service. Those who can’t pay, can’t learn.

It’s not corruption. It’s structure. The university is capitalism’s finishing school, minting both managers and debtors.

The Myth of Merit

We’re told the system rewards effort. But effort without privilege rarely yields the same result. A gifted child in poverty may study twice as hard to reach half as far. That’s not failure; that’s calibration. The machine measures potential by proximity to power and calls the outcome “fair.”

The lesson sticks: inequality feels earned. That belief is the curriculum’s hidden graduate.

The POSIWID Audit

Does education expand freedom or reinforce compliance? — Compliance.
Does it cultivate curiosity or conformity? — Conformity.
Does it equalize opportunity or encode class? — Encodes class.
Does it serve the learner or the system? — The system.

By function, education’s true purpose is social reproduction, not enlightenment.

The Lost Art of Learning

Real learning is dangerous. It destabilizes dogma, questions authority, asks why until the story unravels. That’s why systems domesticate it. To keep power intact, curiosity must be managed.

Children begin as scientists—testing, touching, exploring—and end as employees. It takes about twelve years to make that happen.

Photo by Ismail Salad Osman Hajji dirir on Unsplash

The Human UNity Alternative — Sapienics

Human UNity reclaims education as the engine of evolution, not obedience. The new model is Sapienics—learning for the wise species.

Core principles:

Lifelong mastery. Learning never ends or credentializes. It’s a loop: learn → serve → teach → learn.
Mentorship over management. Teachers as guides, not gatekeepers.
Project-based reality. Students solve actual problems—restore reefs, design energy systems, write stories that heal.
Open knowledge. Global libraries without paywalls; translation as sacred duty.
Ethics and empathy at the core. Intelligence without compassion is regression.

A Sapienics hub could be as small as a village or as vast as a virtual network. No tuition, no rank, just contribution. Learners demonstrate competence by results, not grades.

The Discipline of Wonder

Real education is not easy. It demands the same rigor we once reserved for war. It asks for endurance, humility, and daily confrontation with ignorance. But unlike obedience, this discipline expands capacity instead of shrinking it.

The old system made us literate enough to serve machines. The new must make us wise enough to build ones worth serving.

Closing the Loop

The purpose of the current education system is what it does: create compliant producers and consumers who maintain the status quo. The purpose of Sapienics is what it must do: grow conscious, competent, compassionate humans who can sustain life on this planet.

A civilization that teaches obedience breeds order. One that teaches wisdom breeds continuity. The next syllabus begins with that choice.

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Military: Security Or Supremacy?

Tue, 02 Dec 2025 17:34:38 GMT

As I build the worlds for my sci-fi stories, I’ve found myself studying the real systems that shape this one—government, economy, religion, the military, education, and media. What began as research for future civilizations has turned into an audit of our own. This series of essays is part of that exploration: a search for what our systems actually do, and how we might start designing better ones—here, now, before fiction catches up with fact.

The War Machine

Every empire calls its armies “defense forces.” Every flag frames its wars as reluctant necessity. But Stafford Beer’s axiom still applies: the purpose of a system is what it does. And what the modern military system does—consistently, across continents—is secure resources, enforce order, and preserve hierarchy. It defends the powerful from instability more than it defends the powerless from harm.

The Cult of Protection

The uniform carries moral gravity. “Service” implies sacrifice, courage, discipline. For many of us, those words are real—we’ve bled, sweated, and carried our dead under them. Yet even lived honor can be used as mythic insulation. The institution converts personal virtue into political capital. The soldier’s sincerity becomes the politician’s shield.

When the rhetoric says “national security,” ask what’s actually being secured. It’s usually shipping lanes, oil fields, mineral concessions, or favorable markets—not the safety of ordinary people. POSIWID: if deployments follow resources, then resources are the mission.

The Business of War

Eisenhower warned about the military-industrial complex; by now it’s simply the economy. Defense budgets are economic stimulus plans in camouflage. Weapons development funds research labs, contractors, entire congressional districts. Perpetual readiness justifies perpetual expenditure.

The result is a system that cannot afford peace. If peace breaks out, the stock drops. So “threats” must be managed like inventory—never fully resolved, only rotated.

Empire as Supply Chain

Bases circle the planet in a pattern that maps perfectly onto energy corridors and trade routes. These installations don’t just project force; they project predictability. The world’s flow of goods and data depends on a credible promise of violence should that flow be interrupted.

That’s not defense—it’s insurance for investors. The rifle becomes a derivative instrument, underwriting commerce.

The Human Cost

Inside the machine, individuals live by the code: duty, honor, mission. Those ideals are genuine. The system exploits them. Troops return home to bureaucratic neglect while contractors cash dividends. A trillion-dollar apparatus can deliver a missile in seconds but not a prosthetic in months.

That contradiction isn’t hypocrisy—it’s hierarchy behaving normally. The same logic that prioritizes profit over planet prioritizes profit over veterans.

Photo by HIZIR KAYA on Unsplash

Myth Maintenance

Societies must sanctify their soldiers; otherwise the system loses moral legitimacy. So culture builds the soldier-saint: pure, patriotic, apolitical. Questioning the institution becomes blasphemy. That taboo keeps the recruitment pipeline full and dissent manageable.

The effect is tragic: war becomes self-justifying. Each generation’s losses demand the next generation’s loyalty “so they didn’t die in vain.” The feedback loop closes.

The POSIWID Audit

Does the system preserve peace or manage conflict? — Manages.
Does it protect citizens or resources? — Resources.
Does it heal or exploit those who serve? — Exploits.
Does it reduce or reproduce enemies? — Reproduces.

By outcome, the purpose of the contemporary military is supremacy—maintaining access, not achieving stability.

From Warriors to Guardians

Yet the discipline, cohesion, and courage forged in uniform are precious materials. They can be reforged for a higher purpose. The next evolution of service isn’t disarmament—it’s redirection.

The Steward Corps—Human UNity’s replacement for the war economy—would channel that same rigor into planetary preservation: disaster relief, ecological restoration, crisis mediation, infrastructure repair. Training stays hard. Missions stay real. Only the enemy changes—from rival nations to entropy itself.

Principles of the Guardian Ethos:

Serve life, not empire.
Courage without conquest.
Discipline for regeneration.
Honor through repair.

A hurricane deployment should feel as demanding as a combat one—and as meaningful. Veterans would remain soldiers of order, just in a different theater.

Strategic Realism

True security isn’t domination; it’s resilience. A planet collapsing under droughts, fires, and migrations is a battlefield that no army can win. The mission set must expand from deterrence to preservation. Logistics, intelligence, and coordination—the military’s strengths—are exactly what a warming world needs.

Closing the Loop

The purpose of the current military system is what it does: project force for profit and control. The purpose of a re-imagined one must be what it proves: cooperation as strength, regeneration as defense.

War made us a planetary species by uniting us in fear. Peace will keep us one only if we learn to unite through purpose.

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